Sunday, April 19, 2015

Ever since I arrived here in Shanghai, I noticed there's a huge expat community here. The magazines TimeOut Shanghai and City Weekend are every expat's guide to the city; they review restaurants, put up the latest happenings, list events, and so on, all in English. One common thread that pops up regularly is how the expat community is in a constant state of flux, mostly because people continually come and go. This got me thinking about the differences in the terms "expat" and "immigrant."

I renamed this blog "Expat Hoch Zwei," which is the English term "expat" mixed with "hoch zwei," which in German means "squared." Expat squared because I was an American living in Germany who moved to China. But am I really an expat squared?

The Oxford Dictionary defines each as follows:

expatriate (noun) - a person who lives outside their native country.immigrant (noun) - a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.

I don't have images that would go well with this topic. So here's an image from Zhangjiajie I took.

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About Me

I'm an American who moved abroad to Berlin, Germany in my third year of college. I wound up sticking around and moved to Düsseldorf, so this blog evolved into talking about pop culture too (I'm a pop culture geek). But then I decided to move to Shanghai, China. So I'm an expat squared, or "expat hoch zwei," if I may say so in Denglish. These are my adventures.